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I'd like to know some ideas you have to help make visitors stay on your site and browse more pages. I get a good, solid amount of visitors per month at my site Pawsitronic, but they only visit a couple of pages and usually stay about a minute. Am I doing anything wrong here? Any suggestions from fellow SitePointers would be much appreciated

Have a lot of info. I know that might not work well on your site, but on my baseball site, I find a lot of viewers read my archived articles.

Make old stuff (previous newsletters work too) in an easily noticeable place where they can be perused. I know something that might work as well (although some would call it unprofessional) is to have games somewere on your site.

I received a package in the mail from a company that hosts games on your site and after checking them out, it looks like something which I will embark upon in the near future. If you want to know who this is, just email me and I'll tell ya.

Well, I'm pretty sure I've put most everything in an easily accessable place. There's also a site map just in case. I consider myself to have a lot of good information: a glossary, a help index, and a lot of good features. If any of my visitors have comments or suggestions, I've put up a feedback form for them, and a recommendation form if they know of someone who might be interested in web design. Apart from that, I'm not sure what else to offer (but I'm working on it) Any tips?
<Edited by Sparkie on 01-18-2001 at 09:43 AM>

SitePoint is a content site. The longer the people stay here the higher value and revenue potential SitePoint has in the future. We want people to spend time reading the articles, looking around and participating in the various community features available. Every second we get increases the chances of making a permanent visitor out of them.

Pawsitronic is a commerce site. Your goal is not necessarily to keep the people at your site for a long period of time but to convince them to purchase your services as soon as possible. I would concentrate on this aspect instead of getting them to view every page.

You might want to profile a site out of your portfolio on a regular basis on the indexx page. This will show your customers upfront what you can do for them and draw them in closer. Try to direct people to your quote service and contact them as soon as possible.

In short Page Views should not be your goal but instead focus on purchases.

Wayne is right. They are 2 different types and all you should be concerned about is convincing people you can do the job better than anyone else! Maybe they have just visited and obtained your email address, it doesn't matter if they do not want to look at anything else you have on your site. For example, my stats for Urban Studios and Gib-Onlien are totally different. Visitors to Urban Studios usually look at a couple of pages and if they are interested they fill in my contact form, on the other hand visitors to Gib-Online tend to explore more, go deeper into the site and spend a lot of time browsing.

Thanks Nicky and HyperBaseball, your answers have really helped! I wasn't too sure why I was only getting about 3-6 page views but lots of visitors, and why the stats said 0:00 for some visits. It makes a lot more sense now, thank you all!

Yours seems to be a "specialized" service site (i.e. web design). Someone not interested in your services just isn't going to hang around. Or at best they will bookmark your page incase they need services later. Some types of sites just don't hold visitors for very long. Doesn't mean you did anything wrong but just as people window shop and not buy so they also visit and not stay.

I visited a lot of other web design sites before I ever created my own, and being a visitor who may have been interested in their services, one of the main things that irritated me was that they didn't interact very much with their visitors - no way to recommend their service to friends, no way to contact them, had to email them for a quote when I was completely unsure of the pricing in the first place... All these things I've tried to remedy on my own site

I think you're right, that I shouldn't be aiming for long visits, but instead more visits. Now I can view my stats with a different outlook. For the longest time I thought I was doing something wrong

Another way to approach this issue is RETAINING the user after they LEAVE your site. The best way to do this is through newsletters or free consumer reports you send via an autoresponder tied to a list collector. It gives your site additional value and it allows you to continue communicating with your user.

As usual with email marketing, make sure you have clear and easy to understand unsubscribe procedures in every email. You may even spell this out on the sign up process itself. Double opt-in email works best. The CGI scripts for these are available on the web, some are free [not dual optin], others are for sale, just enter your query into a search engine.

You can dramatically increase your chances of getting a newsletter sign up through a popup window that has a cookie-based timining mechanism. It pops up once, writes the cookie, and does not pop up again until a set amount of time--thus preventing the user from getting annoyed.

Nicky, I use MyDomain.com on some other domains, but Pawsitronic is kept within my hosting account, instead of being a forwarded address. I'm using SiteMeter to keep track of my stats.

Oski, Thank you for your suggestions, I do appreciate it, however my site deals primarily with web design, so I don't have much need for a dedicated newsletter, unless it would be to inform customers of special deals and the like (which I am considering adding). I'd like to steer clear of pop-up windows of any kind, since I am one of those users who gets irritated at having them pop up when I enter or leave a site I will keep your ideas in mind though! Perhaps in the near future I will create a notification list of some kind.